This invention relates to an attachment for improving the safety of the gates that are used to close the openings in the guard rails of walkways for ladders and stairs leading to and from a walkway.
In nearly all industrial plants, there are walkways from which a worker could fall to a lower level. For safety's sake, these walkways are usually provided with guard rails to help prevent a worker from accidentally stepping off the side of the walkway and falling. For various reasons, however, it is necessary to provide openings in the guard rails. Usually, for example, one or more ladders or stairs lead from the walkway to a lower level. Openings are provided in the guard rails so that a person can move from the ladders or stairs onto the walkway and vice versa. Such openings in the guard rails are a danger to personnel using the walkway.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,866,356 that issued Feb. 18, 1975 described a safety gate specifically designed to keep personnel from inadvertently falling from the walkway into the openings for the stairs or ladders, hereinafter "stairwells". The safety gate of the '356 patent has enjoyed tremendous commercial success and can be found throughout the industrial world protecting workers from inadvertently falling through the stairwells in catwalks.
The gate of the '356 patent is positioned about waist high to a worker standing on the catwalk. As a result, there exists an opening between the gate and the catwalk through which it is possible for a worker to slide feet first under the gate into the stairwell. No such accident has been reported to date although these gates have been in use throughout the world for many years.
Nevertheless, there is a need to provide an attachment for these gates that will extend the gate downwardly to a position closer to the catwalks to reduce the chances of a worker slipping under the gate into a stairwell and it is an object of this invention to provide such an attachment and apparatus for connecting the attachment to existing gates quickly and easily without making any changes in the existing gate.
These and other objects, advantages, and features of this invention will be apparent to those skilled in the art from a consideration of this specification, including the attached drawings and appended claims.